THE COLLEGE GOOSE
The College of the City of New York at that time occupied an old brick
building on Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. It gave a five
years’ course, leading up to a college degree; but the first two or
three years were the same as high school years at present. The boy went
there, not because he knew anything about it, nor because he knew what
he wanted, but because that was the way the machinery was built; he was
turned out of the grammar school hopper, and into the city college
hopper. In his earliest days it had been his intention to become the
driver of a hook-and-ladder truck; later on he had decided to follow his
ancestors to Annapolis; now he had in mind to be a lawyer; but first of
all he wanted to be “educated.”
Most of the students in this college were Jews. I didn’t know why this
was; in fact, I hardly knew _that_ it was, because I didn’t know the
difference between Jews and Gentiles. They came from poor families, and
most of them worked hard; they lived at home, so there was little of
what is called “college life” about our education. There were feeble
attempts made to get up “college spirit”; now and then a group of lads
would run about the streets emitting yells, but their efforts were
feeble, and struck me as silly. In the course of time one of the better
dressed members of my class came to me with mysterious hints about a
“fraternity.” I didn’t know what a “fraternity” was, and anyhow, I had
no money to spare; I was living on four dollars and a half a week, and
earning it by writing jokes and sketches for the newspapers.
I took six or eight courses each half year at the college, and as I
recall them, my principal impression is of their incredible dullness.
For example, the tired little gentleman who taught me what was called
“English”; I remember a book of lessons, each lesson consisting of
thirty or forty sentences containing grammatical errors. I would open
the book and run down the list; I would see all the grammatical errors
in the first three minutes, and for the remaining fifty-seven minutes
was required to sit and listen while one member of the class after
another was called on to explain and correct one of the errors. The
cruelty of this procedure lay in the fact that you never knew at what
moment your name would be called, and you would have to know what was
the next sentence. If you didn’t know, you were not “paying attention,”
and you got a zero. I tried all kinds of psychological tricks to compel
myself to follow that dreary routine, but was powerless to chain my mind
to it.
Then there was “history”; first the history of the world, ancient and
modern, and then the history of England. I remember the tall, stringy
old gentleman who taught us lists of names and dates, which we recited
one hour and forgot the next. Here, if you were caught not paying
attention, it was possible to use your wits and “get by.” I remember one
bright moment when we were discussing the birth of the first prince of
Wales. Said the professor: “How did it happen that an English prince,
the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” The student, caught
unawares by this singular question, stammered, “Why—er—why—his mother
was there!”
Also there were the physics classes; rather less dull, because they
included “experiments,” which exhibited the peculiarities of natural
forces—sparks and smoke, and noises of explosions major or minor. But
why these things happened, or what they meant, was never understood by
anyone, and whether an explosion was major or minor was entirely a
matter of luck. I remember composing a poem for the college paper,
dealing with the effect of physics upon a poet’s mind:
He learned that the painted rainbow,
God’s promise, as poets feign,
Was transverse oscillations
Turning somersaults in rain.
And then there was drawing. We sat in a big studio, in front of plaster
casts of historic faces, and we made smudges supposed to resemble them.
On this subject, also, I wrote some verses, portraying the plight of a
student who forgot which cast he was copying, and paced up and down
before them, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno or King Henry of
Navarre?”
I studied a number of complicated technical subjects—perspective and
mechanical drawing and surveying—though now, thirty years later, I could
not survey my front porch. I studied mathematics, from simple addition
to differential calculus. The addition I still remember; but if I were
asked to do the simplest problem in algebra I should not have an idea
how to set about it.
I remember with vividness the men who put me through these various
torments; young men, some feeble, some impatient, but always
uninterested in what they were doing; old men, kind and lovable, or
irritable and angry, but all of them hopeless so far as concerned the
task of teaching anybody anything of any use. Every morning we spent
half an hour in what was called “chapel,” and the old men, the members
of the faculty, were lined up on the platform, and remain to this hour
the most vivid line of human faces stored in my memory. It was their
duty to listen to student oratory; and so perfect had been the
discipline of their lives that they were able to sit without moving a
muscle, or giving the least sign of what they must have felt.
Sooner or later we came into the class-rooms of these old men, and each
in turn did what he could for us. I remember the professor of German,
lovable, genial, highly cultured. During the two years that I studied
with him, I learned perhaps two hundred words—certainly no more than I
could have learned in two days of active study under an intelligent
system. Little things he taught me that were not in the course, for
example by a slight frown when he saw me trimming my finger-nails in
class.
And then the professor of Greek, a white-whiskered old terror. For three
years he had me five hours per week, and today I could not read a
sentence from a child’s primer in Greek, though I still know the letters
and the sounds. I suppose there are Greek words which I have looked up
in the dictionary a thousand times, yet it never occurred to any human
being to point out to me that I might save time and trouble by learning
the meaning of the words once for all. I marvel when I realize that it
was possible for me to read “The Acharnians” of Aristophanes, line by
line, and hardly once get a smile out of it, nor have it occur to me
that there was any resemblance between what happened in that play, and
the fight against Tammany Hall and the Hearst newspapers which was going
on in the world about me.
And then the professor of Latin; he also was a terror, though his
whiskers were brown. He was a prominent Catholic propagandist, editor of
“The Catholic Encyclopedia,” and conceived a dislike for me because I
refused to believe things just because they were told me. I can see this
old gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims:
“Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!” Five hours a week for
five years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I
read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could
read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. I
look at a page of the language, and the words are as familiar to me as
my own English, but I don’t know what they mean, unless they happen to
be the same as the English.
And then the professor of chemistry; an extremely irascible old
gentleman with only one arm. There was a rumor to the effect that he had
lost the other through the misbehavior of chemicals, but I never
investigated the matter. I learned that chemistry consists of mixing
liquids in test-tubes, and seeing that various colored “precipitates”
result. After you do this you write down formulas, showing that a part
of one chemical has got switched over to the other chemical; but why
these things happen, or how anybody knows that they happen, was
something entirely beyond my comprehension, and which neither the
professor of chemistry nor his three assistants ever explained to any
member of my class. My most vivid recollection of this class has to do
with the close of the hour, when a group of us would gather with our
various test-tubes, and each put up a nickel, and guess a color; then we
would mix the contents of the tubes in one big tube, and shake them up,
and the fellow who guessed the right color won the “pot.”
And then the professor of literature. Perhaps you think I should have
had some success in classes of literature; but that only shows how
little you know about college. A new professor came in just as I reached
this class, and I learned in after years that he had got his appointment
through the Tammany machine. A bouncing and somewhat vulgar little man,
he was an ardent and argumentative Catholic, and his idea of conducting
a class of literature was to find out if there was anything in the
subject which could in any way be connected with Catholic doctrine and
history, and if so, to bring out that aspect of the subject. Thus I
learned that Milton, though undoubtedly a great poet, had cruelly lied
about the popes; also I learned that Chaucer was positively not a
Wyckliffite. I had not the remotest idea what a Wyckliffite was, but got
the general impression that it was something terrible, and I was quite
willing to believe the best of Chaucer, in spite of his perverse way of
spelling English words. As part of the process of disciplining our taste
in literature, we were required to learn poems by heart, and this
professor selected poems which had something to do with Catholicism.
Seeing that most of us were Jews, this was irritating, but we got what
fun we could out of our predicament. At that time there was a popular
music-hall song, with a chorus: “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”; so we used to
go about the corridors of our college chanting to this lively tune a
poem by Austin Dobson:
Missal of the Gothic age,
Missal with the blazoned page,
Whence, O Missal, hither come,
From what dim scriptorium?
Whose the name that wrought thee thus,
Ambrose or Theophilus,
Bending, through the waning light,
O’er thy vellum scraped and white!
I hope you know the tune of “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” so that you may
get the full cultural benefit from this recitation!
However, my little Catholic professor of literature did one thing for
me; he let me know of the existence of a poet by the name of Shelley. We
read “The Skylark” and “The Cloud” in class, and there came over me a
realization of the ghastly farce I was going through in this college. I
was near the end of my senior year, but my store of patience gave out,
and I presented a letter to the faculty, stating that I was obliged to
earn my own living, and requesting that I be allowed two months’ leave
of absence. The statement was strictly true, but the implication, that I
was going to spend the two months in earning money, was not true; I
spent the two months sitting on the bed in an eight by ten hall bedroom
in a lodging-house, reading Shelley’s poetry and Emerson’s Essays and
the prose of Ruskin and Carlyle. I went back to college and made up my
lost months in a week or two, and passed my examinations without either
credit or discredit—ranking just in the middle of my class.
I take it that the purpose of education is to discover the special
aptitudes of the student, and to foster them. And here was I, a man with
one special aptitude; here were a score of teachers, with whom I had
been in daily contact for five years; yet I am sure, if these teachers
had been told that one man in the class of ’97 would come to be known
throughout the civilized world in less than nine years, they would have
guessed more than half my class-mates before they guessed me. I am not
so egotistical as to imagine that I was the only man in that class who
had special aptitudes; if none of the others have developed any, I think
I know the reason—the machine had rolled them flat!